The Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Modifies Photographs of Females to Digitally Remove Their Clothes
Elon Musk's social media platform X has provoked major backlash after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to manipulate pictures of women by stripping their attire.
Several cases have been seen where the system has been used to digitally undress female subjects to make them appear in bikinis non-consensually, as well as to put them in sexually explicit contexts.
Company Reaction and Legal Position
XAI, the company behind Grok, remained silent to inquiries, except for an auto-reply message stating "traditional news outlets lies".
A Home Office representative stated that legislation is being proposed to prohibit image stripping software. Under a proposed criminal offence, anyone who distributed such tools would "receive a prison sentence and substantial fines".
"The platform is capable of halting these types of misuse if they wanted to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "seem to have a lack of consequences."
Oversight Body Stance and Tool Capabilities
The regulator Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the potential" of people accessing illegal content on their networks, but did not specify whether it was currently looking into X or Grok in concerning AI-generated images.
Grok is a free chatbot—with some premium functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they tag it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to offer reactions or further background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also can edit an posted picture through its AI image editing function.
Background of Criticism and Policy
The tool has been criticised for enabling users to create pictures and clips with explicit content and sexualised material, and it was earlier accused of generating graphic material of public figures.
"X has been enabling the creation and distribution of these pictures for a long time without taking any measures and we have yet to see any challenge by regulators," Professor McGlynn added.
XAI's own terms of service prohibits "showing images of individuals in a sexually explicit fashion".
In a comment, Ofcom said it was unlawful to "make or distribute deepfakes or illegal content" and clarified this covered explicit AI images made with AI.
It said networks such as X were required to take "necessary steps" to "reduce the risk" of users encountering illegal content on their platforms and to take down it promptly when they are notified of it.
